Background: In the context of large-scale educational assessments, the effort required to code open-ended text responses is considerably more expensive and time-consuming than the evaluation of multiple-choice responses because it requires trained personnel and long manual coding sessions. Aim: Our semi-supervised coding method eco (exploring…

Advances in computer science and computational linguistics have yielded new, and faster, computational approaches to structuring and analyzing textual data. These approaches perform well on tasks like information extraction, but their ability to identify complex, socially constructed, and unsettled theoretical concepts--a central goal of…